pbcopy and pbpaste

The Unix command line has historically interacted poorly with the numerous graphical interfaces that have been stacked upon it. One key area lacking support is the clipboard. MacOS X brings two utilities to close that gap, pbcopy and pbpaste. These commands together provide complete access to the MacOS X clipboard (which Apple calls the pasteboard, explaining the names of these two commands).

The first of the two, pbcopy, takes its input from the standard input and adds it to the system clipboard. The command only accepts one option, -pboard, which accepts one of four suboptions, “general”, “ruler”, “find”, and “font”, all of which are different system clipboards available on MacOS X. The general pasteboard is the main system clipboard and the others are for special use.

The pbpaste pulls data from the clipboard and prints it to the standard output. Like pbcopy, pbpaste accepts the option -pboard to determine which pastebaord to acquire data from. The pbpaste command adds a second option, -Prefer which takes three possible options “txt”, “rtf”, and “ps”. These options direct cmd{pbpaste} looks for a certain type of formated information on the pbasteboard. The “txt” flag suggests standard text data. The “rtf” and “ps” suggest Rich Text Format and PostScript, respectively. Despite this option, it is not possible to direct the exact output pbpaste prints. This option only tells pbpaste what type of information to return first.

These two commands offer the MacOS X command line warrior a simple and fairly complete set of tools for working with and manipulating the MacOS X pasteboards.